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In light of China's rapid growth and increasing engagement in the global climate regime, the authoritarian regulatory model has attracted attention from researchers and policymakers alike. This paper examines the question of to what extent and in what way state authoritarianism leads to (un)successful environmental policy implementation in China, with particular attention to energy transformation. This study inter-connects macro and micro inquiries through a case study of nuclear energy policy in China. An examination of the extended policy cycle as a comprehensive process that brings a policy to fruition shows that authoritarian regulatory environmental policy intervenes in each stage, resulting in a particular path of the evolution of environmental policy in nuclearising energy transformation in China. Adding to commonly accepted tenets of authoritarian environmentalism in general, the explanations of Chinese distinctiveness in materialising environmental policy enhances the understanding of the merits and challenges of authoritarian mechanisms of environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are crucial in crafting effective national climate policies in democratic states. At the same time, there is a practical and academic debate of whether political parties matter for policy output. This article speaks to this debate by investigating the link between what parties say and what parties do with respect to environmental issues. More concretely, it analyzes whether there is a connection between the degree of environmentalism expressed in parties' electoral manifestos and national environmental policy output. Theoretically, the article draws on existing research on program-to-policy linkages in general and for environmental issues specifically to argue that saliency of environmentalism in party manifestos shapes more stringent environmental policies. This argument is empirically tested by combining data on policy stringency with data on manifesto contents for 28 countries for the period 1990–2015. The findings corroborate the main hypothesis, which has implications for understanding the overall potential for political parties to structure national environmental politics. The article concludes by sketching broader implications for research on parties' ability to shape national environmental policy across political systems, and across partisan ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, The Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion released a report called Believers, Sympathizers, & Skeptics: Why Americans Are Conflicted About Climate Change, Environmental Policy, and Science, which found that a total of 78% of Jewish Americans considered climate change a "crisis" or a "major problem." (Jones et al., 2014, p. 12). In this article, I argue that even as Jewish perspectives on climate change and the environment are varied, there are significant resources within the Jewish tradition that contributed to the development and growth of Jewish environmentalism and climate change activism and advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research analyzes the Twitter network made up of users and their interactions during the Conference of the Parties (COP) COP15 held in Montreal from December 7 to 19, 2022. The main objective is to measure the characteristics of the network and identify the key players in the conversation and the main topics addressed. We also sought to recognize if there was any relationship between the format of the messages and the level of engagement. To carry out the analysis, we used a methodology that combined quantitative and qualitative social network analysis techniques. The results suggest that communication through Twitter was a key factor in the successful mobilization of the environmental movement during COP15 and in raising awareness of the need to take concrete actions to address climate change. Likewise, the highest engagement was generated by mostly critical and urgent messages, focused on the need to take concrete action to address the biodiversity and climate change crisis. This reflects a separation between the activism reflected in the network and the scientific and political leadership present at the Summit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a global environmentality framework to critique efforts to "green" the Belt and Road Initiative (or Green BRI) by examining the Chinese state's environmental governance of extraterritorial spaces. The article transcends a focus within governmentality studies on domestic processes to reveal the relations between governance techniques and environmental subjects, including state and nonstate actors, beyond sovereign borders. Drawing on interviews, observations, and analysis of policies and reports, we identify three ways in which global environmentalities operate and are negotiated through the Green BRI. First, the Chinese state is embracing international sustainable development criteria to gain global legitimacy while seeking to export its domestic environmental governance model, making the Green BRI a dialectic policy. Second, the state is targeting and disciplining BRI participants, including Chinese financial institutions, construction companies, the renewable industry, and foreign state actors in BRI countries. Third, Chinese and BRI partner country participants' variegated subjectivities arise out of the negotiation of their own interests, Chinese state interests, and BRI host country concerns. Our analysis contributes to understanding of how China, as a rising power, engages in global environmental governance and produces extraterritorial environmental subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we learn from the prodigious expansion of the non-government protected areas that now comprise 12% of terrestrial Australia? An increasingly professional, formal, and diverse non-government sector has developed since 1990, comprising private individuals, non-government organizations, and First Nations and having close ties to governments. We investigate the drivers, dynamics, and diversity of this sector through thematic analysis of 24 key informant interviews and associated gray literature. Changing environmental movements, science-led conservation, partial recognition of First Nations land rights, international agreements, and neoliberal reforms combined to formalize the sector during the 1990s. A bipartisan policy framework for incorporating non-government lands in the national conservation estate, diverse partnerships, transnational networks, and innovation in public and private funding helped grow the sector. The confluence of interests that has transformed the politics and practice of nature conservation in Australia is likely to inform those engaged with similar changes elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of the first Canarian environmental associations at the end of Franco's regime. Starting with a general description of environmental policies during the dictatorship, the article then hones in on the role of the sociable, scientifico-naturalist experiences afforded by mountaineering groups, which in turn gave rise to a certain kind of environmental association in the Canary Islands. Furthermore, the article describes the organizational forms, the themes, the repertoires of action and the main environmental conflicts in which such groups participated, assessing their role as precursors of the new environmental movement that emerged during the transition to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar to live in Bangladesh, mostly in Cox's Bazar district. The government has been praised worldwide for sheltering them, but this enormous influx has strained its limited resources. As the host communities struggle with the Rohingya for control over and access to the scarce natural resources they depend on for their livelihood — land, water, agriculture, and forests — tension and conflict arise. The host community members perceive that the government and aid agencies prioritize the Rohingya over the host communities in allocating resources, exacerbating their resentment. I argue that although both the locals and the Rohingya are poor and marginalized, as citizens, the locals have a stronger claim to environmental citizenship and rights to state resources. Any ecological policies taken towards the safeguarding of resource usage rights of the Rohingyas should also be inclusive and should give equal consideration to the local host community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines alley life in three Taiwanese cities, demonstrating that the investigation and interpretation of those mundane everyday practices and events in these alley-places lead us to think about the ethics of everyday dwelling. This ethics, though mostly forgotten now in the Taiwanese public realm, was actually the center of attention in the 1990s when a concept was proposed about urban environmentalism that is significantly different from the current public perception of it. This form of environmentalism related to a new momentum for placemaking that was happening at that time nearly three decades ago and propagated across the island and into its alleys during the new millennium. Delving into alley places, this article shows how ordinary landscapes of proximity have turned into extraordinary lifeworlds for dwelling. To materialize this dwelling imaginary, this paper first addresses theories that seek to spatialize culture in order to identify these unexpected lifeworlds in their ordinary urban settings. Theorizing those tiny little places, often hidden in plain sight, brings back to the attention of researchers what I call dwelling ethics that characterizes quotidian judgments, choices, decisions, as well as its consequences. This paper concludes that conceptualizing dwelling ethics in the contemporary circumstance of urban explosion provides a baseline for the idea of environmentalism of life through which a critique of everyday life becomes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to a recent reengagement with Ecocritique: Contesting The Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture which was published 25 years ago. The authors who have engaged with this work in this symposium not only address the relevance of ecocritique as a theory and methodology for addressing contemporary environmental issues, but provide new insights into the work through their criticisms. My reply discusses their commentaries and offers response in the form of elaboration and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In international politics, is environmental protection largely a "rich-country" priority? We perceive four reasons why, although individual exceptions are possible, the answer would be yes: as a country meets more of its basic economic needs, it can better take on environmental policy's long-term thinking, policy expenses, collective action problems, and quality-of-life issues. To cut through lip service paid by governments that are not serious about environmental protection, and the fact that the "BASIC" countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) occupy a gray area between rich and poor, we employ computer-assisted textual analyses on all 3,774 paragraphs of statements made by national governments between 1995–2012 in the Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE) within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Controlling for other factors, we find a general pattern of environmental discussions increasing as development level increases. This contributes substantively and methodologically to the literatures on the environment/development nexus and rising powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper my thought experiment leads me to posit that South Africa's environmental governance often results in what I term "hollow environmentalism". This term describes the inevitable long-term outcome of promulgating laws and policies that are idealistic and seem symbolic and that at times fail to achieve their intended objectives or environmental promise. On a narrower scale, hollow environmentalism can also manifest when such symbolic environmental laws and policies lead to judicial decisions that lack substantive ecological justifications, perhaps even resembling symbolic judgments. I substantiate this argument through four key considerations. I commence with a reality check on environmental governance, emphasising that the state is not a neutral actor, necessitating closer scrutiny of state decisions. This leads me to the conclusion that governance stands at a critical juncture. I argue that the symbolic nature of our environmental laws, broadly speaking, often makes it challenging for the state to fully meet the lofty ideals it presents, thereby also complicating court decisions in these matters. Next, I align my thoughts with recent literature on adjudication in the context of the climate crisis. This literature stresses the need for courts to be bold and innovative in their judicial roles, given the precarious nature of stabilising environmental disputes. In the penultimate section I bring the discussion to a close by suggesting two interconnected possibilities to address hollowness in the face of climate change: "sunsetting" and "substitution". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impact of economic inequality and educational background in shaping how non-activist "standby" youth in London experience environmental politics. Focus groups were carried out with 33 young people aged 16 to 22 in three groups from higher and lower positions of socio-economic status and educational background. The intention of this article is to offer learning that signals a need for further research into the ways in which intersecting inequalities impact young people's participation in environmental politics. The findings reveal that these "standby" young people have distinct experiences of their political agency in navigating the inequalities that impact their lives. Key to these understandings of agency are collective and individual feelings of efficacy and the ability to make positive change happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In looking at Carol Browner's leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency, this article draws on insights from the literature on women and executive politics, women and the environment, and environmental policy and decision-making, bridging these fields of study to explore the height of US executive environmental politics through a gendered lens. It examines whether Browner articulated a feminist analysis of environmental issues and whether her life experiences differed from those of the men who previously dominated environmental politics, and if those translated into distinctive concerns and policies. Focusing on a selection of Browner's key environmental priorities and initiatives, this article ultimately assesses the impact she had on the development of environmental policy in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While political environmentalism played an important role in social mobilization against communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservationism appeared to be in decline across the region, and external pressure from European institutions and Western donors influenced environmental policy. What explains the effectiveness of protest since the environmental movement emerged in the 1980s? We trace the emergence and evolution of Polish political environmentalism, looking at three levels of the environmental movement's legitimacy: the level of practices, societal support, and discourse. Each phase identified between 1980s and 2017 saw shifts on different levels of legitimacy, and each ended with a spectacular environmental protest or a decision, bearing implications for the following phase. Since 2010, we see a deep polarization of Polish politics, limiting the effectiveness of environmental protest despite the movement's regained triple legitimacy in large parts of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsustainable dependence on natural resources combined with the absence of strict regulation and political stability have battered the environment of Lebanon. Examining the work of Ricardus Haber, we analyse how local institutional arrangements have shaped policy outcomes in a mostly top-down, politicised context. Lack of political will and communication between different sectors, institutional deficiencies and embedded corruption hinder effective governance of natural resources. The Lebanese environmental movement has failed to build on Haber's early success but, if we have peace, there are still opportunities for networking with policymakers, increasing incentives and creating a better participatory platform for stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tapestry of compliance and voluntary market mechanisms for carbon and other environmental attributes in Canada's infrastructure capital markets reflects the almost 30-year history of carbon policy development in Canada and around the globe. This history of provincial and federal policy and regulatory changes has left some scars and stranded investments. As a result, energy market professionals and emission offset project developers have had to be resilient in their efforts to scale, integrate, and maximize opportunities for carbon credit products. Recently, we have witnessed increased efforts toward climatefocused investment criteria and technology-bolstered acceleration toward net-zero targets. Carbon credits are one of the key tools that will allow conventional businesses to continue operating as the economy decarbonizes, and they can also facilitate investment in new technologies and practices that will be critical to achieving material economy-wide emissions reductions. Both domestically and internationally, however, there are key barriers that are limiting carbon markets and that highlight the need for more carbon finance investment and policy certainty, as well as standardization and credibility in both compliance and voluntary environmental product markets. Following the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in March 2021 to uphold the constitutionality of the federal government's Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, market expectations were high (and perhaps still are) that the regulatory landscape supporting carbon finance in Canada would finally come into better focus. This article will explore the current snapshot of compliance and voluntary carbon finance tools available in Canada, and will highlight some of the challenges and opportunities in navigating the interplay between these products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article encourages a closer dialogue between contemporary anthropological reflections on nature and the environment and environmental justice (EJ). We can revise the environment concept by adopting a more nuanced view of the ontological relations between humans and non‐humans. The idea of 'assemblage' as reworked in the Anthropocene debate enriches EJ with a multispecies perspective and a new 'temporal awareness'. Ethnography grounded in the confluence of human/geophysical agency and temporality can help us understand past eco‐social dynamics and possible futures and overcome environmental inequalities and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese authorities have formulated a vision for the global future that it terms 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生态文明). It was introduced into Communist Party ideology in 2007 and endorsed by Xi Jinping in 2013 as a major framework for the country's environmental policies. During the 2000s, the government set in motion many stricter environmental regulations and targets in line with this vision, including opening up some new room for bottom-up, volunteer-driven initiatives mostly on waste collection, recycling, education, and sustainable agriculture. At the same time, it calls for more participation of women in environmental governance at grassroots levels. Surveys in different parts of the world, including China, have suggested that women tend to be more concerned with environmental issues than men, but we have few qualitative studies in China of this topic. This article details three case studies in which women have initiated environmental projects in their local communities. They have mobilized other women (and some men) to engage in collective action, and they have generated financial and symbolic resources for their projects. We analyse these cases and argue that by raising the status of environmental issues such as waste collection and recycling, previously often downplayed as "women's affairs", China's environmental turn has helped expand the space available for female subjectivities and participation in public activities. However, this expanding role has not translated into better representation or participation of women at higher levels of political authority beyond the village level, and the emerging female environmental subjectivities remain firmly based in existing political hierarchies and male-dominated structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on experiences of participation by civil society actors, we propose to develop a diagnosis of the relationship between society and the State in policies of adaptation to climate change in Acapulco, Guerrero. The information was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews. The information was coded and categorized by identifying one or more text passages with a theme and relating it to a code. We found a fragmentation of agendas and mechanisms for public action by civil actors in a political environment characterized by a sub-national authoritarianism that prevents the construction of dissident political agendas, and a lack of specialized knowledge about the problem of climate change by local activists. For climate science information to be assimilated, it must actively communicate in the appropriate language, seeking participatory mechanisms that generate reliable and transparent data production, and that strengthen the emergence of a common environmentalist agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networks are an important part of the environmental policy process as they influence the ability of actors to synthesize information and learn to manage complex risks. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the dynamics of policy network formation lead to structures exhibiting belief‐oriented segregation—that is, a high correspondence between shared beliefs and policy‐relevant interactions. These structures may be produced through at least two pathways: belief homophily, where actors actively seek out connections with others sharing their belief system, and policy‐oriented learning, where connected actors become more similar in their beliefs. The cross‐sectional design of much policy research does not allow an examination of these potentially complementary forces that shape belief systems and networks. These dynamics are studied using data on policy beliefs and networking in the U.S. environmental risk policy subsystem across two time periods, 1985 and 2000 (N = 223). Results indicate strong homophily effects, but relatively weak learning effects in the evolution of this policy network. This study helps pave the way for additional research on the dynamics shaping policy networks and beliefs, and helps to clarify the differences between individual versus organizational contributions to policy network evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about the religion and environmental attitudes relationship in the United States has yielded mixed results. Some studies find that religion relates to heightened concern about environmental threats and greater environmental interest whereas others find religion relates to diminished concern and interest. A new perspective that applies ideas from psychology and sociology may help resolve these discrepant findings. It is hypothesized that religious meaning reduces concern with environmental threats since meaning helps people cope with distressing stimuli. This reduction is specific to threats and does not extend to environmental interest. Using the 2016 General Social Survey to test this hypothesis, after controlling for sociodemographic and political variables, structural equation modeling shows Americans who are more religious experience diminished sense of danger from environmental threats, yet exhibit heightened general environmental interest. These findings align with the proposed theory and suggest new ways to promote environmentalism and policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green parties have been quintessential issue owners since their founding. In recent national and European elections, however, these parties have begun to emphasize additional issues. This article seeks to understand when the greens expand their issue focus to talk about economic issues. It develops a theory of issue expansion which posits that the greens' issue expansion is related to both party competition and economic context. In particular, it posits that the size of the radical-left party and the rate of unemployment influence the degree to which green parties focus on the economy in their election manifestos. It then tests the theory on a dataset of European green parties which have run in national elections between 1981 and 2017 in 14 West and East European countries. The findings have important implications for understanding party competition in general and the issue evolution of new politics parties more specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of neoliberal environmentalism was to unleash the market to protect the environment; but as it turns out, things are getting worse on our way to catastrophe. Despite persistent failures, neoliberal environmentalism remains prevalent—and apparently without alternative. This paper directs focus on an often-overlooked dimension of this apparent stasis: the nexus of self and society in advanced capitalism, as shown in the linkage between neoliberal environmentalism and the autonomous ecoconsumer. Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation is engaged to better understand how environmentalist desire is currently being thwarted in ways that inhibit movement toward socioecological emancipation. The paper provides an illustrative example of desublimated environmentalist desire in the current recycling crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key puzzles of authoritarian environmentalism is its dubious effectiveness due to fragmented interests among different political and market actors, which are often found undermining centrally crafted environmental regulations and targets. China recently launched a series of institutional reforms to fix its notorious local implementation gaps on environmental policies. By setting up a stringent central inspection system and holding frequent inquiry meetings with local government leaders, Beijing aims to reconfigure central–local power relations on environmental governance. We argue that these institutional reforms are essentially transforming environmental governance in China into a highly politicized task by enforcing party disciplines rather than legal frameworks. The aim is to rein environmental officers and hold local political leaders accountable. These reforms may significantly reduce local protectionism, yet such highly politicized approach based on coercive party rules and disciplines bears the risk of weakening the role of legal enforcement and can breed discontent among local officers. Consequently, how these new reforms can achieve a desirable central–local relation for addressing China's environmental crisis in the long run is far from certain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada has prioritized "reconciliation" with Indigenous peoples just as debates over the ecological impacts of extractive industries are rising in volume and vigour in the public sphere. While apparently distinct, these two substantial and pressing priorities—and their underlying harms of colonialism and extractivism—can be seen as intertwined issues of social, economic, and environmental justice and sustainability. Thus, interweaving—more than "integrating" or "bridging" as employed in the literature—Indigenous ways of living and knowing and Euro-Canadian knowledge systems in resource development projects stands to help Canadians advance both environmental protection and respect for First Peoples and their traditionally used and claimed territories. Building on these premises, this study by "a White person of consciousness" examines the needs, benefits, obligations, frameworks, and challenges of involving Indigenous ways of knowing in the current framework for approving and managing resource development projects in Canada. It notes imperatives and efforts to link Indigenous and settler systems of "knowledge" in such projects and lessons learned and suggests best practices for policies and practices aimed at encouraging both environmental protection and Indigenous conciliation, which can further each other. Finally, the study considers implications of such interweaving for Canada's international standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the future of 'environmental' policy in times of earth system transformations and the recognition of the 'Anthropocene' as a new epoch in planetary history? I argue that fifty years after the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, we need to revisit the 'environmental policy' paradigm because it falls short on five grounds. The paradigm (a) emphasizes a dichotomy of 'humans' and 'nature' that is no longer defensible; (b) is incompatible with more integrated research concepts that have overcome this human-environment dichotomy; (c) deemphasizes questions of planetary justice and democracy; (d) fails to deal with novel normative challenges of the Anthropocene; and (e) may risk political marginalization of central concerns of human and non-human survival. In the second part I discuss institutional implications, arguing for novel approaches in science collaboration, new institutional arrangements and a more central place for questions of planetary justice and earth-system risks in governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to open a conversation about multispecies justice in environmental politics. It sets out some of the theoretical approaches, key areas of exploration, and obvious challenges that come with rethinking a core plank of liberal theory and politics. First, we discuss some of the diverse scholarly fields that have influenced the emergence of multispecies justice. We then discuss core concerns at the centre of this reconfiguration of justice – including broadening conceptions of the subject of justice and the means and processes of recognition (and misrecognition). The importance of deconstructing and decolonising the hegemony of liberal political discourse is crucial, and is part of a larger project for multispecies justice to rework a politics of knowledge and practice of political communication. Finally, we begin to explore what a commitment to multispecies justice might demand of politics and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the status of public opinion research in the environmental politics field and how individuals assess cues of cooperative behavior from other actors before they decide to incur private costs for the production of an environmental public good. It mentions motivate social scientists outside the environmental policy field to use findings from environmental scholarship in their work. It also mentions understanding of environmental attitudes at specific national and subnational levels, and on how environmental concerns stack up against other policy issues.

This guest editorial reflects on the relevance of anthropology for extinction concerns, a rapidly expanding practical, ethnographic and theoretical space at a time of impending mass extinction. While biological extinction is necessarily a multispecies development (usually implicating humans), traditional species talk – focused on taxonomies, collections and classification – needs critical rethinking as it necessarily diverts attention from the vitality of life. The broad discipline of anthropology has much to offer for understanding processes of extinction and recovery, fleshing out habitat problems and prospects of extinction, and advancing meaningful environmentalist practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the establishment of Protected Areas (UC's), part of Brazilian environmental policy, has constituted a face of the conflictive relationship between traditional peasant and indigenous communities and urban-industrial society UC's were implanted, especially from the 1950s, on territories historically occupied by traditional and original populations and became another factor in transforming the territoriality of these communities, which already suffered from the advance of the agricultural frontier and the modernizing project of the period. The struggle for territory, associated with a part of the environmental movement, led to the conquest of some rights, including access to land, through protected areas of sustainable use. However, environmental policy has been used to solve territorial issues and has therefore been a mediator of the territorialities of peasant communities. In this article we discuss how the establishment of protected areas tends to replace land policies, analyzing the contradictions that arise from the mediation of access to the traditional territory for environmental conservation, and we argue that this trend has been constituting at the same time a strategy for maintenance of the Brazilian agrarian structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare and rights of nonhuman animals have become highly politicized issues, and political arguments concerning these topics are bound to collide with opposing views and face problems of legitimacy. This article seeks insights especially by drawing comparisons with environmental policy. This is implemented by showing how the animal question has been connected with different environmentally relevant policy questions in Finland. Analysis is backed up by earlier research literature about the differences between animal and environmental questions. This analysis shows that, in real-life situations, these two policy goals can be molded into various combinations, and the theoretical and sometimes highly polarized debates about the differences between the animal question and environmentalism do not always lead to conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of prospective environmental (in)justice (PEJ) is proposed to make sense of situations in which development proposals and the actions of state and market actors create injustices even before the development projects become a material reality. Through this concept and its application to two cases of opencast gold-mining, a broader conceptualization of socio-environmental (in)justice is invited that considers multiple forms of injustice of rural communities in Romania and Bulgaria during more than a decade of waiting for the 'actual harm' of mining to happen. The mere prospects of opencast gold-mining have, in fact, shed light on deep-seated and ongoing dimensions of socio-environmental injustice such as, land-grabbing, slow community disappearance and marginalization, daily psychological damage, disavowal of alternatives and disqualification as political subjects. These injustices experienced collectively could be seen as constitutive moments of systemic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambient air pollution represents a global health crisis, leading to 7 million annual deaths worldwide. The rise of a "global environmental regime" manifests in the widespread adoption of environmental policies and laws to reduce ambient air pollution, but debate remains whether they have any effect. Scholars argue that the relationship between the global environmental regime and air pollution depends on the penetration of the global environmental regime. In this analysis, I argue that the relationship between the global environmental regime and air pollution levels is contingent on a country's position in the world-system. Using fixed effects panel analyses of 144 countries from 1990 to 2010, I find embeddedness in the global environmental regime does predict lower national air pollution levels. This effect, however, is smaller in semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. These findings contribute to an emerging body of scholarship integrating world society and world systems approaches in the study of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on different approach than those advanced by opponents and proponents of cost–benefit analysis (CBA). It mentions crux of the controversy concerning the use of CBA in environmental rulemaking revolves around the value of nature and place of nature in society have shaped American environmentalism. It also mentions system of environmental laws that governs relationship and development of environmental ethics.

Objective/Context: This article explains how the Sierra de La Macarena Biological Reserve, which marked the beginning of the new state responsibility of caring for nature in Colombia, was conceived and then created by law in 1948. Additionally, this paper reconstructs the first decade of its existence. Methodology: This research is based on archival documents, historic publications and secondary sources, which allow us to understand the ideas about nature that guided such history and the concrete processes that characterized it. Originality: This article studies the process of State formation from a territorial and environmental perspective, bringing together political and environmental history, and pointing at new avenues of inquiry in both fields. Conclusions: The beginnings of a new state responsibility of caring for nature depended on previous developments of the state itself, particularly on the efforts to deal with tropical diseases. Therefore, an area of state activity devoted to insure the well-being of the population served as the basis for the inceptive development of another. This issue was, however, not entirely national. Global scientific networks, including medical doctors, entomologists and geologists, together with an innovative technology, aviation, also played a crucial role. The research station that was conceived along with the reserve to support long-term research was partly impaired by La Violencia of the 1950s. Instead, scientists carried out several expeditions that contributed to turn La Macarena into national patrimony, at least in the minds of some Colombians. Given that aspirations well exceeded the achievements, the definitive emergence of this area of state performance had to wait a few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous scales in climate change politics might create problems for activists, as it is not always easy to locate the appropriate level(s) according to which they develop collective action frames. Therefore, activists might address various scales while identifying the problem and building strategies accordingly. The Turkish climate movement has been active through protest cycles largely influenced by global climate negotiations. Following the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (2009) in delivering a binding climate deal, the movement shifted its strategy. Using the protest event analysis method and the movement's archives, this paper attempts to shed light on how the Turkish climate movement learned from this global policy failure and why it switched from the global diagnostic and prognostic framing to a national/local one. Following this, the extent the European and transnational actors contribute to this frame shift will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines environmental justice in Colombia. Topics discussed include Colombian Constitutional Court's (CCC) sentence of the Atrato River, which was the result of a writ of tutela filed by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Tierra Digna on behalf of several community councils of afro-descendant communities, and decision of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) on the protection of the Amazon Rainforest.

Environmental policy in Chile has developed rapidly in recent years, and the country has become a regional leader in renewable energy, climate change policy, recycling, and nature conservation. This contrasts with the previous neglect of environmental issues in the country and its depiction as a 'green laggard' (Orihuela, 2014: 251) within Latin America. In this article the recent development of environmental policy in Chile is reviewed and five factors affecting this development are analysed: international influences, institutional legacies, a window of opportunity opened by environmental movements, policy entrepreneurship, and business power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the environmental and legislative considerations and public debate in the development and construction of the Dworshak Dam in Idaho between 1942 and 1973. It discusses the interaction between the state and federal government, the role of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and how individuals and groups transferred their local perspectives on natural resources to a national awareness of environmentalism.

Advocates for eating locally raised animals claim that their practice is helpful in protecting the environment. However, the opposite is true. As such, their references to "nature" have less to do with a scientific stable ecosystem and, instead, represent a call for a return to a "natural" order of human's supposedly benevolent domain over other animals. Instead of a science-based environmental policy, local meat operates as a type of "postcommodity fetish." It is because of the desire to escape the confines of consumerist culture, to return to romanticized idea of Edenic-purity, which underlies the desire to purchase "locally" produced animal products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suburban residents in the Detroit metropolitan area practiced a homeowner environmentalism that sought protection of property values, local sovereignty, and a bucolic aesthetic, while rejecting the sacrifice of political power or resources to the larger region. Such homeowner activism deftly navigated a new political terrain created in the wake of passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Using three case studies of organizations successfully defying major regional developments, this article illustrates the regional planning challenges created in the context of increasing environmental activism and ongoing urban crisis in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the evolution of the Green Grants program, run by Brazil's Ministry of Environment, as a means for developing the concept of bureaucratic activism. When the Workers' Party first took office in 2003, many social movement actors joined the government, especially in that agency. After 2007, however, most of these activists left the government. At the same time, the ministry substituted thousands of temporary employees for permanent civil servants. Surprisingly, this study finds that these public employees carried forward the environmentalist cause, even when this required contesting the priorities of superiors. Examining their attitudes and practices leads to a definition of activism as the proactive pursuit of opportunities to defend contentious causes. The case study helps to develop this concept and to demonstrate that workers inside bureaucracies can engage in activist behavior. It also explores the effects of bureaucratic activism on environmental policymaking in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the significance of transnational production, aesthetic, and narrative strategies in recent forms of "apocalyptic" science fiction cinema. As the article explores, a more transnational mode of science fiction offers the opportunity for popular genre cinema to engage with pressing environmental questions, the contexts of climate politics, and particularly the historical and present role of science fiction in confronting, or sometimes avoiding, these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular environmentalism can have limited democratic outcomes if it reproduces structures of social order. This article seeks to advance understandings of environmental democratization by examining the analytical framework of civic epistemologies as a complement to the current use of environmental narratives in political ecology and science and technology studies. Civic epistemologies are the preexisting dimensions of political order that the state and other actors seek to maintain as unchallengeable. They add to current analysis because they show the structures around which narratives form, as well as how knowledge and political agencies of different actors are coproduced in reductive ways. The article applies this analysis to popular environmentalism in Thailand and especially concerning community forests and logging from 1968 to present. Using a combination of interviews and content analysis of historic newspaper reporting, the article shows how diverse actors—including state, elite conservationists, and peasant activists—have organized political activism and ecological claims about forests according to unchallenged norms of appropriate community culture and behavior. These actions have kept narratives about forests and society in place and worked against alternative and arguably more empowering visions of communities and forests in recent years. The article argues that revealing civic epistemologies can contribute to a deeper form of environmental democratization than engaging in environmental politics based on existing narratives or analyzing the limitations of narratives alone. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmentalism, political ecology, science and technology studies, Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is environmental expertise? The background to this question is that many scholars consider environmental expertise crucial for discovering, diagnosing, and solving environmental problems but do not discuss in any depth what constitutes expertise. By investigating the meaning and use of the concept of expertise in three general theories within environmental sociology-the treadmill of production, risk society, and ecological modernization- and findings from science and technology studies (STS), this article develops a sociological understanding of environmental expertise: what it is and how it is acquired. Environmental expertise is namely about group belonging and professional socialization around specialized skills; that is, it concerns both substantial competence and social recognition. The implications of this general view on expertise are then used to enrich theories in environmental sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]